One of the companies I was working with had an office that looked like a star. It was a multi-office dental group, and this location was booking more new patients per day than any office we reviewed. If you only read the marketing report, you'd have sent it more ads.
So I followed the patients past the booking. At that office, 70 patients applied for financing in one month. Twenty-eight were approved. Only four went ahead with treatment. Another office got 15 approvals and 14 of those patients said yes.
Same company. Same marketing. A very different result. The difference showed up after the patient walked in.
The busy office had a new treatment coordinator. That's the person who sits with a patient, walks through the plan and the payment options, and helps them decide. The coordinator was still learning, and patients who were ready to say yes were leaving without starting. That wasn't an ad problem. It was a coaching problem, and case acceptance was where the money leaked. More ad money would've sent more good patients into the same leak.
We started coaching right away. Then we changed how we ran the monthly review. Each office's report went past bookings to show financing applications, approvals and funded treatment. Our planning for the next year added a profit and loss view by office, a monthly finance meeting with the regional managers, and a target to bring marketing spend down as a share of revenue. Marketing, operations and finance started looking at the same patient, from the first call to the finished treatment.
That's how I think about marketing KPIs for CEOs. You don't need every marketing metric your team can pull. You need a short list that tells you four things. Are we attracting the right customers? Where are they dropping out? What does it cost to win one? Are they worth it? Then you need one more thing most reports skip: a decision.
Start with the question you both agree to answer
A marketing report can be right and still answer the wrong question. Website visits can climb while the business needs more qualified buyers. Revenue can grow while the customers behind it bring in less profit.
CEOs and CMOs often aren't reading the same scoreboard. In McKinsey's study of CEO and CMO views, 70% of the CEOs they surveyed judged marketing by revenue growth and margin. Only 35% of the CMOs tracked that as a top metric. [1] Marketing leaders know it, too. In The CMO Survey, 86.3% of the marketing leaders who answered said they're building stronger performance tracking, and 57.7% are running experiments to prove what marketing adds. [2]
So before you pick the scorecard, agree on the job. Are you filling empty capacity? Entering a new market? Fixing customer profit? Rebuilding a thin pipeline? The answer changes which numbers matter.
Then agree on the words. A lead isn't a qualified buyer. A booking isn't finished treatment. An order isn't always recognized revenue or cash in the bank. I like a one-page metric dictionary. It says what each number means, who owns it, where it comes from and when it's ready. If the CMO brings attributed sales and the CFO brings recognized revenue, they can both be right. They're just measuring different things.
1. Qualified demand: are we attracting customers we can serve well?
Start with qualified demand. What "qualified" means depends on your business. For a manufacturer, it might be a project with the right application, a real budget and a buyer who can sign. For a services firm, it's a client whose problem fits what you do best. In healthcare, it's a patient who can be seen, needs care you offer and can move forward.
Pick one definition that sales or operations can use the same way every time. Then report two things side by side: the number of qualified buyers, and the share of inquiries that qualify.
Here's why both matter. Say inquiries jump from 100 to 150, but qualified buyers drop from 40 to 30. Activity is up. Quality fell from 40% to 20%. That needs a closer look before anyone asks for a bigger budget.
The cause could be targeting. It could be the message, an offer that pulls the wrong crowd, or a change in how the team qualifies. It could also be sloppy records. Sit down with the people who handle those inquiries and look at a handful together. They'll often tell you what the dashboard can't. I wrote more about that gap in Why Are Leads Up but Sales Flat?
If you run a sales pipeline, look at the value and timing of new qualified deals, too. Keep pipeline separate from booked revenue. A big deal with no next step shouldn't get the same weight as one with a signed meeting.
The CEO's question is simple. Are we creating more of the demand our plan needs, or just making the top of the funnel look busy?
2. Conversion rate: where does interest stop turning into business?
One conversion rate can hide where growth gets stuck. That's what happened to us. Add up the offices in that review and you get 388 financing applications, 110 approvals and 42 funded treatments. The approvals weren't the big problem. The step after the approval was.
So follow the customer through the steps your business really has. For us it was call, booking, visit, treatment plan, financing and treatment. For a manufacturer, it might be quote request, proposal, order and reorder.
For each step, divide the number who moved forward by the number who could have. Use the same group of customers, and give them time to move. Dividing this month's orders by this month's inquiries can fool you. Many of those orders came from last month's inquiries.
Look at three things at each step: the count, the rate and the time it takes. A lower win rate with a longer buying cycle needs a different fix than a steady win rate with fewer buyers coming in.
Watch the denominator. If ten people book and eight show up, that's 80% of bookings. It isn't 80% of everyone who called. Keep no-shows, cancellations, reschedules and duplicates in view, so a change in record keeping doesn't look like a change in customer behavior.
Read the reasons for lost deals, too. "Not interested" tells you nothing. A pattern of lead times, financing, follow-up or price gives the team something to fix. That's why I care so much about what happens after the phone rings.
My rule for this part of the meeting: name the step that's leaking, and name the person who can fix it. Marketing, sales and operations share this path. The scorecard should help them work together, not point fingers.
3. Customer acquisition cost: what are we really paying to win a customer?
Customer acquisition cost sounds simple until two departments bring two versions of it to the same meeting.
The Journal of Accountancy describes CAC as sales and marketing costs divided by the customers you won. It also covers narrower campaign costs. The lesson is to agree on what's in the number before you compare anything. [3]
I keep two numbers. Ad cost per customer tells you how the media is doing. Full CAC adds the people, agency, creative, technology and sales costs that finance agrees belong there. Say you spend $20,000 on ads and win 100 customers. That's $200 each. Add another $10,000 in agreed costs and the full number is $300. Neither should quietly replace the other. That's the customer acquisition cost formula in plain words: the costs you agreed on, divided by the new customers you won.
Split shared costs the same way every month and write down how you did it. If the rules change, say so. Don't let a new formula look like a sudden win.
Timing matters here, too. Match spending to the customers it brought in as closely as your buying cycle allows. If you sell on a long cycle, a rolling view will tell you more than one calendar month.
Then ask why the number moved. Did media get pricier? Did conversion slip? Did the mix of customers shift? Or did you invest ahead of growth on purpose? Each answer leads to a different move.
Watch blended CAC. A healthy average can hide one channel that's getting expensive and another that mostly brings back customers you already had. Pull new customers apart from returning ones first. And don't make a big budget call from a handful of sales that could swing on one more deal.
At the dental group, one region was spending about a third of its revenue on marketing. You can't see that from a cost-per-lead report. You see it when finance and marketing look at the same page.
4. Customer lifetime value and payback: are the customers we win worth what we paid?
A low acquisition cost only helps if the customers you win are worth it. We learned that one the hard way.
The dental group had an older lead vendor that brought in a big share of our business. By the report, it was doing fine. Its cost per lead even came down over the year. But the production each new patient started from those leads fell by about half. The leads got cheaper, but the patients they brought in were worth even less. That vendor ended up on the cut list in the next year's plan.
The American Marketing Association's lifetime value guide ties customer value to margin, how often people buy and how long they stay. [4] Wharton researchers Fader, Hardie and Lee add an important point. Your model has to fit the relationship. A subscription cancel is easy to see. A long gap between purchases doesn't always mean a customer is gone. [5]
For the monthly review, start with numbers you can explain. Show revenue and gross profit from each group of new customers, and show what it cost to win them next to it. Two customers can each bring in $1,000. If one leaves $600 in gross profit and the other leaves $200, and you paid $250 to win each, they aren't the same customer. A revenue-only report treats them alike.
Check your CAC payback period. How long does it take a customer's profit to cover what you spent to win them? Use real results by customer group when you can. A quick estimate like CAC divided by monthly profit only works if that profit stays steady.
Customer lifetime value (LTV) is a forecast. Show what you've actually seen and what you're guessing separately. A precise number can still sit on a short history. And there's a cash question. A customer can look great over five years and still take too long to pay back for where your company is today. Look at that with finance. No single payback period fits every business.
If your team needs a shared starting point, a strategy workshop is a good place to agree on the customer economics that matter.
5. Future demand: are we protecting the demand we'll need next year?
A monthly review can turn into a monthly squeeze if every dollar has to pay back by next month. That's not what I'm after.
In its summary of the 2026 report Go Big or Go Home, the IPA describes Binet and Davis's warning: chasing short-term efficiency too hard can hurt long-term growth and profit. [6] So ask one more question. What are we doing now that helps customers pick us later?
Pick a few signals that fit your growth plan. That might be awareness or consideration with your target buyers, your share of a priority market, direct inquiries, or deeper relationships with target accounts.
These numbers need a careful read. Branded search can move with publicity, the season or your existing customers. A survey needs the same audience and method each time. Bigger engagement numbers need proof that the engagement matters.
Look at these signals every month, but judge them over the right stretch of time. Some research only runs once a quarter or once a year. Say when it was last measured.
Give each long-term effort a learning milestone. A new market push might first need proof that the right buyers understand the offer. Later, the question becomes whether qualified deals are showing up. Agree on those milestones ahead of time, so nobody invents a new way to call it a win after the results come in.
Marketing attribution: how much does the number deserve your trust?
Every scorecard needs a short note on what's measured, what's estimated and what isn't finished yet.
Marketing attribution is a good example. Google Analytics describes attribution as giving credit to the touchpoints on the way to a sale or sign-up. [7] That's useful. But it doesn't tell you how much extra business a campaign really created.
Researchers Gordon, Moakler and Zettelmeyer looked at 663 Facebook ad experiments. The non-experimental methods they tested often couldn't match what the experiments found, even with lots of user data. [8] That's a good reason to ask "how do we know?" when someone says an ad drove sales. When you can, run a real test. When you can't, say what the evidence can and can't tell you.
Recent numbers may not be done yet. Google's guidance on conversion lag explains that late conversions can make recent cost per acquisition look too high and return on ad spend look too low. [9] Mark recent results as early. Check for duplicates, missing outcomes and tracking changes. Then match your totals to what finance and operations see.
When these numbers need to go into a marketing report for a board meeting, use the separate framework in What Should Marketing Report to the Board?
Turn the monthly marketing review into a decision
Keep the marketing scorecard to one page. Think of it as your CEO marketing dashboard, with detail ready when someone asks. For each number, show the result, the target, a fair comparison, the count behind it and a line on what changed.
Pick comparisons on purpose. With seasonal swings, the same month last year can beat last month. Small groups may need a longer window. A new location should be pulled out before it muddies the average.
Then add the part most dashboards leave out: the decision.
- If qualified demand dropped, look at the audience and the message.
- If one step leaks, fix that handoff and name who owns it.
- If customer profit slipped, look at cost, margin and mix together.
- If results are too new, agree on when they'll be ready to judge.
Give every decision an owner and a follow-up date. Keep last month's decisions on the page so the team can report what happened. That's what turned our financing problem from a bad number into a fix. It had a name next to it and a date to come back.
Your first month may show you can't answer every question. That's useful. Find the missing records or fuzzy definitions that block a decision, and make fixing them part of the plan.
| The question | Numbers to pick | What has to come with it |
|---|---|---|
| Who fits? | Qualified count and qualified rate | The definition, the counts, the customer mix |
| Where do they stop? | Step-by-step conversion and time between steps | The same customer group, enough time, reasons lost |
| What did winning them cost? | Ad cost per customer and full CAC | What's included, how shared costs are split, the time period |
| What comes back? | Customer profit, payback, repeat or renewal | What you've seen versus what you're forecasting |
| What grows next? | A few brand and demand signals tied to the plan | How it's measured, when it was last measured |
| What do we do now? | One decision per problem | An owner and a follow-up date |
I don't expect a scorecard to run the company. I expect it to help the people running it ask better questions, look at the same evidence and make a clear call. Our busiest office didn't need more ads. It needed someone to look one step past the booking.
Questions CEOs ask
What marketing KPIs should a CEO review every month?
Five groups: qualified demand, conversion at each step, acquisition cost, customer value, and a few signals of future demand. Every number should come with a definition, the counts behind it and a decision.
How many marketing KPIs should a CEO track?
Fewer than you think. One or two per question is plenty for the monthly page. Keep the detail in the back for when someone asks.
What's the difference between cost per lead and customer acquisition cost?
Cost per lead counts inquiries. CAC counts customers you actually won, and full CAC includes the people, agency and tech costs finance agrees belong there. A cheap lead can still be an expensive customer.
Should marketing pay for itself every month?
No. Some work pays back fast and some builds demand for later. Review it monthly, but judge each effort over a time frame that fits its job, and agree on that ahead of time.
What should be on a CEO marketing dashboard?
One page with the five groups of marketing KPIs: qualified demand, conversion at each step, ad cost per customer and full CAC, customer profit and payback, and a few future demand signals. Next to each number, show the target, a fair comparison, the count behind it and the decision it leads to.
What is a good CAC payback period?
It depends on your margins, your cash and how long customers stay. No single number fits every business. Work it out with finance using real profit per customer, and make sure the payback fits where your company is today.
How is a monthly CEO review different from a board report?
The monthly review runs the business. It's where you find the leak and assign the fix. A board report is shorter and explains strategy, results and big risks to directors.
If your reports look good but revenue isn't following, read Your Marketing Reports Look Good. Why Isn't Revenue Growing? If you need someone to run this review with you, here's how fractional CMO leadership works.